books

If there’s only one book on your shelf about coffee, there’s no doubt in our mind which one it should be: The World Atlas of Coffeeby James Hoffmann. Hoffmann, famously, is the co-owner of London’s Square Mile Coffee Roasters and the 2007 World Barista Champion. His popular Youtube channel has changed the way we use our French press, helped us keep chaff off our counter, and given us some candid commentary on everything from “specialty” instant coffee to new products. Hoffmann’s groundbreaking book is now available in a second edition, which includes six new country profiles. Hoffmann was gracious enough to answer a few questions we had about the book.

First of all congratulations on the second edition of The World Atlas of Coffee. How long has the second edition been in the works?

In some ways work started on the second edition the moment the first was released. I kept a running file of people’s feedback, captured little tiny errors or things I wanted to improve. The edition was actually commission over 18 months ago. The nature of books like this – very heavily illustrated – is that they need to be wrapped up nearly six months before publication, so there’s weird period of nearly half a year after you’ve finished the work before you can really talk about it….

Almost every specialty coffee lover, whether professional or enthusiast, can remember the cup that changed everything. Coffee is just coffee, until you encounter berries, flowers, and a multitude of other sensory experiences you never expected from your morning cup. Talking with other coffee lovers, I’ve found, more often than not, that life-changing cup came from Ethiopia.

Ethiopia is the motherland of Coffea arabica. The plant is indigenous to the country and it’s still home to 99% of the plants’s genetic diversity. Ethiopia is also home to the oldest coffee culture. While in many places coffee is simply a cash crop, in Ethiopia it’s a central part of life.

Yet, in spite of this, information about Ethiopian coffee is not readily available. You might have a region, the process, a grade, and if you’re lucky, a washing station. Even less information is available about the forests of Kafa, where wild coffee trees still grow.

I’ve often bemoaned that specialty coffee doesn’t have a book like Kermit Lynch’s classic memoir Adventures on the Wine Route. The story of how coffee travels from remote farms in the tropics to cafés around the world is rarely told, and when it is, it’s usually stripped down to utilitarian logistics. But an exciting new book from coffee industry veteran Ryan Brown aims to offer aspiring green coffee buyers a field guide to a largely mysterious, but incredibly important, aspect of the coffee industry. We caught up with the author of Dear Coffee Buyer: A Guide to Sourcing Green Coffeeto find out what inspired the book, who’s it for, and what gear he packs when he travels. …

You know craft coffee has gone mainstream when stand-up comics are ripping on it. In Jim Gaffigan’s book Food: A Love Storyhe dedicates several pages to how his caffeine addiction led to an appreciation of specialty coffee. The result is both a well-deserved lampooning and an affectionate apologetic for boutique coffee. Here are our nine favorite zingers from the book. …

At The Compass we have a simple approach to coffee: do whatever James Hoffmann says. Thankfully, that’s about to get a lot easier now. Today on his blog Hoffmann announced he’s publishing his first book, The World Atlas of Coffee. Considering the burgeoning growth of specialty coffee, there’s a surprising dearth of reliable books on coffee. With Hoffmann’s new book, we’re optimistic we’ve finally found a single authoritative tome on coffee. Hoffmann comments,

The book isn’t about me, or about Square Mile Coffee, but just about coffee. The book is divided into three sections: an introduction to coffee in general, a section on brewing techniques (aimed at making professional standards accessible and worthwhile to home users) and then the atlas section, with individual countries divided by continent.

Scott Rao needs no introduction for most of our readers. His landmark book The Professional Barista’s Handbookhas influenced the current generation of coffee professionals perhaps more than any other single resource. His books have been formative for our own coffee education, so we were excited for the opportunity to ask him a few questions.

You recently published your third book on coffee, Espresso Extraction. What motivates you to write?

I wrote my first book because I had some free time after selling a business and had always been frustrated as a barista that there were no good resources for learning. After 14 years of full time work owning cafes, I felt I was ready to contribute to the industry’s knowledge base, and spent a few months educating myself in the local university’s physics library before writing the professional barista’s handbook.